Open your social media app of choice and it’s obvious we’ve plopped deep into soup season. There’s simmering pots of creamy gnocchi, lovingly prepared corn chowder, and bubbling soondubu jjigae on repeat. When the world is dark and cold, soup is here to warm us up from the inside out. It’s sloppy but delicious. It’s hard to mess up. Soup is tantalizing in its banality. But it’s not just cooler seasons when soup dominates our internet identities—online, soup has become a year-round vibe.
The fervor started in 2014, when a clip from a 1995 Seinfeld episode of George Constanza lining up to get soup started making the rounds. “I gotta focus. I’m shifting into soup mode,” he says. Three years later, a pixelated shitpost of a pure-but-depressed-looking frog standing next to a bowl of soup showed up everywhere. In 2019 a bundled-up baby Yoda delicately sipping a steaming bowl of broth delighted millennials of Soup Twitter.
Then the pandemic spawned the soup girlie—which broadly includes anyone who literally or figuratively loves soup, no matter the gender identification. In August 2021 a buttery smooth voice delivered the viral line: “Gorgeous gorgeous girls love soup.” That same month the words “good soup,” uttered by Adam Driver in a wounded tone that’ll play your heartstrings like a violin, reverberated across TikTok after the clip from a Girls episode landed on YouTube. In fall of 2021, an audio clip of the musician Beabadoobee exclaiming, “I really want some miso soup—ooh, miso soup!” also became one of the app’s most popular sounds.
It’s not just memes and buzzy jingles; soup has saturated every corner of the internet. We’re watching celebrities cook soup on Instagram. A BuzzFeed quiz asks you to deem a slew of soups as sexy or not to predict your love language. The music video for BTS member J-Hope’s viral song, “Chicken Noodle Soup,” has nearly 400 million views. Bon Appétit’s most popular recipes of 2022 featured, you guessed it, soups. A subreddit dedicated to soup is a daily flood of poorly lit bowls of beef stew, chicken noodle, and gumbo. On TikTok, recipe videos nested under popular hashtags, like #SoupTok and #Soup, have racked up billions of views.
These online pockets of soup worship are some of the last “innocent corners of the internet,” says Hayden Haas, a.k.a. @delishaas, a TikTok creator and self-professed soup girlie. “If you end up on #SoupTok, you’ve made it; you’re on a good algorithm.” People like Haas are intentionally highlighting soup’s approachability and diversity to build community. “I want to bring people together,” he says. “Soup is so easy to make; it’s a very inclusive club where everybody is welcome.”
Soups are always Joanne Lee Molinaro’s most popular recipes. “One guy who remade my jjigae recipe said it’s like coming home to a hug, and I think that so perfectly encapsulates what soups can do for people,” says the recipe developer, who goes by @thekoreanvegan on social media.
Writer Anne Helen Petersen, who moderates subscriber forums as part of her popular newsletter Culture Study and has hosted two soup-sharing threads, thinks the food encourages an earnestness and a willingness to engage with other people. “You can’t be a bitch when you’re talking about soup,” she says. Both of her soup threads are filled with hundreds of comments—which include a lot of emphatic support for Ottolenghi’s curried lentil soup as well as helpful recipe tweaks to build on cooking basics—posted by people of all ages and backgrounds. “Last year someone made a spreadsheet with all of the soup recipes,” she says. “That kind of thing is very soup girlie.”
Soup Internet sits squarely within a genre of wholesome content that has been steadily growing since the 2016 election, says Don Caldwell, the editor in chief of Know Your Meme, which traces the origins of internet culture. As Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a writer who studies momfluencers, argued in a Substack post about “cozy season” last year, “Coziness has become a powerful social media aesthetic.” She cites a neat, inviting online world of “neutral-toned knits,” “freshly brewed hot drinks,” and flickering candles. It’s all an attempt to offset “the unpredictable reality of the world outside.”
In Caldwell’s mind, our online impulse towards curated coziness is a natural reaction to chaotic times: polarizing politics, skyrocketing inflation, global warming, and a never-ending pandemic, to name a few dark themes. Videos of tantalizing soup recipes and cute baby Yoda memes offer “a way to take a break from all the toxic shit,” he says. Petersen also thinks our love of soup is wrapped up in a desire for security and comfort. “We all want to be ensconced in a blanket, essentially,” she says. A bowl of split pea soup—whether or not you actually make it—is a speedy solace. “Watching somebody make soup is healing too,” Haas argues.
Even saying the word—soup—is a delightful experience. The way your mouth forms a pouty kiss. And the unavoidable tonal uptick when you articulate the bouncy, happy little p on the end, like whoop.
The first ever mention of soup on Twitter happened in March, 2006: “I go to HO foods to get soup for my sick-getting self,” wrote @crystal, one of the platform’s earliest users. You don’t need to know what kind of illness they were fighting to understand why steamy soup felt like the right answer. Forever, a bowl of liquid food has been thought of as medicinal, for all its ability to relieve our ails. The post generated an objectively meh 85 likes, but it offers a snapshot of a primal yearning for coziness—the want to be coddled—that now dominates social media almost two decades later.
By the end of 2020, many of us became versions of Crystal, whether we were actually ill or not. I still wonder what my emotional state would be like if I didn’t have a weekly ritual of pounding edibles and nursing a steamy bowl of Tuscan fish stew, lemon-tortellini soup, or dill-y borscht while I melted into the couch like candle wax.
Put another way: Does the rocketing popularity of soup content also represent a kind of collective cry for help, as Jezer-Morton thinks is true of the cozy aesthetic in general? In the same way a hot shower feels so much better after a day in the snow, maybe soup seems like such a powerful prophylactic right now because it’s just so brutal out there. “You want something that’s going to soothe you from the inside out,” says Molinaro.
The ability to go “soup mode,” as George Costanza coined all those years ago, has become our shared, virtual practice of softness and mush. It might have been a coping method forged amid years of hardship. Or maybe it’s not that deep: It might just be that soup tastes really, really good.